I don't normally do this, because I'm not usually playing music while I work. But with pseudo-Islamic fundamentalists attacking London and pseudo-Christian fundamentalists salivating over the Supreme Court, I needed some tunes. Here's what's on the party shuffle:

"Wooden Jesus" - Temple Of The Dog

"Good Morning Good Morning" - The Beatles (finding a lot of help from my friends here)

Rehnquist's retirement was suggested earlier today by conservative columnist Robert Novak who relies on a bevy of anonymous Republican sources.

Novak suggested that Rehnquist's departure could allow President Bush to nominate Alberto Gonzales. The veteran conservative pundit said he expected no change in the ideological balance of the court.

"Word from court sources that ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist also will announce his retirement before the week is over," Novak wrote today. "That would enable Bush to play this game: Name one justice no less conservative than Rehnquist, and name Gonzales, whose past record suggests he would replicate retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on abortion and possibly other social issues. Thus, the present ideological orientation of the court would be unchanged, which would suit the left just fine."

Novak again. Why isn't that guy in jail, anyway???

If there ever were a wake-up call, here it is, our very own snooze alarm reminding us what's at stake. Scary times.

When my mother went to law school, she was one of only a few. She graduated near the top of her class (forgive me but I've never been able to remember the Latin descriptive) and got some pretty high-powered interviews. One was with Major, National, Firm & How. She was told that if they hired her, "the secretaries would get angry." Yes, that's right. This was some 20 years after Sandra Day O'Connor graduated Stanford Law. Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Today apparently a majority of law students are women. I hold out hope in this. For one thing, this might make issues that women find important part of the "important shit."

Of course, he felt compelled to add that there are other things that are important, too (because we don't want women thinking that their shit is part of the "important shit," now do we?), but he stood up and made his point. At least he had front-page privileges, because the rest of the posts seemed to be well-intentioned, but perhaps a bit blind to the dire circumstances that women are facing with an anti-Roe court. For example, DavidNYC offers call-to-action links that conspicuously omit any reproductive rights sites, or even NOW. Helpful, but perhaps missing the heart of the matter.

I don't mean to pick on the DailyKos crowd, but given the recent "huff" he and his defenders got into over women having opinions of which he did not approve, they've almost become the epitome of the barriers women face in the progressive and liberal ranks of the political landscape.

Without birth control and the right to abortion there can be no real gender equality. It's as simple as that. If our fertility is controlled by the government we will ultimately bear children when that government wishes and we will not bear children when that government wishes. Having children changes our lives, more for women than for men, perhaps, but our lives are changed nevertheless, and sometimes these changes are damaging and physically and mentally costly. There can be no real freedom for women to walk down the road at dusk if such a walk could result in a rape which cannot be proven to the satisfaction of the government and if the rape then results in a pregnancy. Giving birth to a child can be dangerous. Bringing up a child in this world is demanding. To have someone else decide when and if you do these things is devastating.

The pro-life answer to these worries consists of abstinence. Women can always say no, we can always cross our legs. But this ultimately means saying no to walks at dusk, perhaps saying no to the new job, interesting but too demanding, or having someone else say no to that job for you because women will just have babies and thus cannot be trusted. And note how the idea of women saying no is one-sided, how the responsibility for abstinence is put on the shoulders of women alone. As if women today were scouring the streets in the search for reluctant men to have sex with. And it doesn't solve the rape dilemma: what if I am raped, get pregnant, and can't prove the rape? What if I'm not raped but had sex because, well, because human beings do want to have sex, and I get pregnant but already have six children and can't feed them? What if I have psychological problems and being pregnant makes me see razor blades for my wrists everywhere?

Abstinence doesn't work. Sex is like food, and people will have sex whatever the punishments we pile on such behavior. The pro-lifers want the punishment to be giving birth or dying from a botched up abortion. This is what sometimes goes for pro-life.

A world without reproductive choice is not a good one for women. Be careful, be more careful than ever, and yet your uterus might be used against your own wishes. Your life doesn't belong to you, never mind about your body. Your fertility belongs to the politicians who decide if you should breed (yes, if you are white, perhaps no, if you are not).

A world without reproductive choice is not a good one for men, either. However careful you are, you might become a father or at least someone who pays child maintenance for the next two decades. And you will have to worry about your daughters, your sisters, your wife, your girlfriend.

No, there can be no real equality without reproductive choice. It's as simple as that for me.

That is why this is not negotiable. That is why reproductive rights are an essential part of a just society, and claims that it's merely a matter of "privacy" and not part of the "important shit" are made of the stuff to which they supposedly aspire ... total and utter crap.

Fortunately there are people like Booman, who reassure me that we are not lost in the frame of the self-important patriarchy:

Women have only recently escaped from the arranged marriage, they have only recently gained the right to refuse sexual relations with their husbands. It is only in the last few decades that we have lived in a society where we could even begin to hold a woman responsible for getting pregnant. And, unfortunately, there are still a lot of situations where women get pregnant through no fault of their own.

Every day, girls are raped or molested by their fathers, their uncles, their brothers, their priests, their teachers, and so on.

Every day, women discover that something is terribly wrong with their pregnancy, and their baby is going to be born with a variety of difficulties.

For me, the bottom line is that women can only be equal citizens when they have power over their reproduction. That means that women must be free to marry whom they want, at an age they want, and they must be allowed to use contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and they must be allowed to terminate a pregnancy that is problematic, or unwanted.

It's ridiculous to think that every pregnancy is a conscious and willing choice. I think it is wrong to use abortion as a form of contraception, provided there are other forms of contraception available. But the real issue is: who the hell is the government to interject themselves into the personal, and often excruciatingly painful, matter of woman's reproductive rights?

If the government is going to overreach it's constitutional mandate, it should stick to doing it to protect people's civil rights, not to trample them.

Ultimately this issue is not about abortion, it's about the government's power to control our bodies. And that, like it or not, is all wrapped up in gender. Call it "women's issues," call it "abortion rights," but one thing that reproductive rights are at the core of, and that's women's equality.

Either we believe in it, or we don't. Yes, some things are that simple.

The CNN-USA Today Gallup poll asked the public, do you want a new Supreme Court justice to be someone who would vote to uphold Roe v. Wade -- the decision that legalized abortion -- or someone who would vote to overturn it?

By better than two to one, Americans prefer a Supreme Court nominee who would vote to uphold Roe v. Wade -- and continue to give constitutional protection to abortion rights.

Even Republicans are divided on the issue. Nearly half want a justice who would uphold abortion rights.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of respondents nationwide favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases. The survey of 1,082 adults, conducted in April 2005, showed that only 14 percent of those surveyed wanted to keep abortion illegal in all cases, with another 27 percent wanting most cases to be illegal.

Voters donâ€™t want the government and politicians involved in their choice about abortion. In a recent survey by The Mellman Group, 62 percent of respondents felt the government should not interfere with a womanâ€™s access to abortion. Only 33 percent believe the government should restrict access.

But what about the Supreme Court specifically, and its stance on Roe v. Wade?

Nearly 60 percent of Americans say that, if presented with an opportunity to appoint one or more new justices to the Supreme Court, President Bush should pick individuals who would uphold Roe.

The Associated Press/Ipsos-Public Affairs Poll, which surveyed a national sample of 1,000 adults last November, found that only three in 10 respondents (31 percent) favored nominating justices who would overturn Roe.

It's a fairly sure bet that the wingnuts won't like that. But reality never stopped them before. They're certain to start whining again about a potential filibuster. The only problem is that the people want a robust confirmation process:

Three-quarters of the respondents in a poll of 1,000 likely voters said that the Senate should examine each of the presidentâ€™s nominees carefully and make its own independent judgment. Only 24 percent thought that the Senate should just confirm whomever Bush puts forward.

In fact, maybe this is a good time to note that most people are against the radical conservatives' efforts to take away birth control from women:

When the debate expands beyond abortion, voters show overwhelming support for a number of issues impacting womenâ€™s reproductive rights, family planning and prevention of unintended pregnancies. Voters recently surveyed by Planned Parenthood Federation of America overwhelmingly (78 percent) favor requirements that schools teach sex education, and 79 percent favor access to emergency contraception (EC) for rape and incest victims.

A large majority (65 percent) favors EC for all women, and 66 percent said that health-insurance policies should cover contraceptives. Respondents further showed strong support (67 percent) for a law making it clear that contraception does not constitute abortion and should not be regulated by abortion legislation. Furthermore, in the recent debate over pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, only 40 percent of those surveyed agreed that pharmacists should be allowed to do so.

Now a lot of radical agitators will try to claim that the Republicans won the last election, and that means the people support their extremely radical views to take away women's control over their own bodies. But in fact, this past November people were not voting on the abortion issue:

In the months since November 2004, a host of commentators insisted that abortion had a negative impact on the election; some even blamed Democratic candidate John Kerryâ€™s loss on his support for abortion rights.

However, data collected by Lake Snell Perry & Associates for the nonpartisan network Votes for Women 2004 shows that the election issues about which voters most cared were the economy (23 percent), national security and terrorism (19 percent), and the war in Iraq (13 percent).

When voters were asked what made them decide their presidential choice, only 2 percent volunteered the issue of abortion. Among Kerry voters, less than 1 percent offered this as an issue. Among Bush voters, only 2 percent said abortion determined their vote for president.

The radical conservatives like to bellow and crow about "the will of the people," but here it's quite obvious that they are out of step with the American people. Will they listen? Undoubtedly, the Republicans will do all they can to appease the radical pseudo-Christian special interests who ultimately want a Christian theocracy (like Iran, only without the Koran).

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and a key swing vote on issues such as abortion and the death penalty, said Friday she is retiring.

O'Connor, 75, said she expects to leave before the start of the court's next term in October, or whenever the Senate confirms her successor. There was no immediate word from the White House on who might be nominated to replace O'Connor.

Now I am really scared.

Possible replacements include Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and federal courts of appeals judges J. Michael Luttig, John Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Michael McConnell, Emilio Garza and James Harvie Wilkinson III. Others mentioned are former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, lawyer Miguel Estrada and former deputy attorney general Larry Thompson, but Bush's pick could be a surprise choice not well known in legal circles.

Another prospective candidate is Edith Hollan Jones, a judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who was also considered for a Supreme Court vacancy by President Bush's father.

O'Connor's appointment in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, quickly confirmed by the Senate, ended 191 years of male exclusivity on the high court.

*snip*

Perhaps the best example of her influence is the court's evolving stance on abortion. She distanced herself both from her three most conservative colleagues, who say there is no constitutional underpinning for a right to abortion, and from more liberal justices for whom the right is a given.

O'Connor initially balked at letting states outlaw most abortions, refusing in 1989 to join four other justices who were ready to reverse the landmark 1973 decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Then in 1992, she helped forge and lead a five-justice majority that reaffirmed the core holding of the 1973 ruling. Subsequent appointments secured the abortion right.

In other words, if you tought politics were getting ugly, you ain't seen nothing yet!